LeRoy Lottmann & Deanna Benjamin

About Deanna

I read, write, and teach in St. Louis, Missouri. It is the first city I’ve been able to call home since leaving Houston, Texas, three states ago. What most attracts me about St. Louis is its storied past, namely Tennessee Williams’s (rogue?) college days and Kate Chopin’s late-in-life literary start. I also like the brick architecture and countless parks. I could even go fishing in a lake in Forest Park if I had a fishing pole. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is a charm and a muse perhaps because, in addition to having excellent performers, it holds several free concerts, including the season opener in September on Forest Park’s Art Hill. Other charms and muses that keep me here: St. Louis Art Museum, the summer’s Shakespeare Festival, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Juniper’s deviled eggs, Natasha’s falafel, Happy Dog Spot and my friends. Having a backyard big enough to exhaust our two can-we-really-call-them-puppies-now-that-they’re-nearly-four-year-old furry companions helps, too.

On the reading side of life: I have volunteered for Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Hunger Mountain. I have edited two books on architecture, Lina Bo Bardi (Yale, 2013) and the Lina Bo Bardi-Albert Frey Exhibition Catalogue, In Search for a Living Architecture (Prestel, 2017). I served as the assistant editor for creative nonfiction at Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat) an online literary journal of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, for Issues 24 and 25. While their, I also curated “Home,” one of the special folios for issue 24.

In terms of writing, Brevity, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, Status Hat, The Houston Literary Journal, and Red Claw Press have published my essays, poems, and stories. These days, I am revising a memoir about my life as a gambler’s daughter and working on poetry and lyric essays. “Pleiades,” my most recent essay, is slated to appear in the August issue of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.